The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss Lawrence M. Krauss

I first stumbled upon the journalist Katherine Brodsky, who has been a commentator and writer for various media outlets, when I heard about her new book, No Apologies: How to Find and Free Your Voice in the Age of Outrage. The title intrigued me but I admit I was a bit skeptical. Having written and spoken about co-called cancel culture in the academic world, I expected I might find nothing new in her book, but I was wrong.
Katherine was motivated to write her book after her own experience of being mobbed online after having defended a colleague in an online media group she helped moderate, for the crime of having posted a job opportunity at Fox News. While she had become aware of the growing social intolerance she was witnessing around her, it was her own experience that caused to make a crucial decision. These kind of experiences can be debilitating, as she had discovered, and she decided to explore the experiences of others, to see how they had recovered their voices, fought back against the mob, or otherwise moved on.
The stories in No Apologies are poignant, and fascinating. Katherine is a clear and compelling writer, and an eloquent expositor, as I discovered during our discussion. We explored her own experience, her interests in journalism, and her own takeaways from the stories she explored as a journalist, which form the basis of the book. It was a fascinating and provocative discussion, and in many ways uplifting rather than depressing. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did, and that it helps others to deal with the a society that seems to be becoming increasing intolerant to free and open discussion about important issues.
As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well.


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Irwin Shapiro is a remarkable human being by almost any standard. Following his education in physics at Cornell and Harvard, he had a job at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory working on various problems in planetary dynamics, and radar ranging, when he went to a lecture and realized that a completely new phenomenon could occur in General Relativity that no one had proposed in the half-century since Einstein first proposed it. For objects traveling near a massive object like the Sun, the travel time to go from one point to another would be slightly longer than it would be if one simply divided the distance traveled by the speed of light. One might think this is simply due to the fact that light takes a curved trajectory near a massive object, rather than traveling in a straight line. But as Shapiro showed, there is an additional time delay, due to the fact that clocks tick somewhat slower in a gravitational field than they would otherwise.
This effect, now known as the Shapiro Effect has become known as the 4th test of General Relativity, a test the theory passed when Shapiro and collaborators used the Haystack Observatory to carefully measure reception times for radar signal that passed near the sun.
Irwin went from that triumph to Chair the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at MIT, and from there to Harvard to lead the Harvard Smithsonian Observatory. He remains at Harvard, where at 94 years old, as Timkin University Professor, he still teachers classes, is doing research in biology, and plays tennis several times a week!
Besides all of this, Irwin is one of the most lovely and gentle scientists I have known in my career, which continued after my stint at Harvard largely because of encouragement he gave to me at a very difficult time for me. As a result, it was a pure delight to reconnect with him after many years, and have a conversation about his long career, the evolution of science in the 60 odd years that he has been doing it, and about life in general. I hope you enjoy it, and find it as intellectually and emotionally stimulating as I did.
As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well.



Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

I first became aware of Jonathan Kay through his writing for the online magazine, Quillette. And for full disclosure, I got to know him better because he is one of their editors, and he has edited several of my own pieces for that magazine. Before that, however, I had been a fan of his writing, and was happy to be able to have an extended conversation with him about writing, journalism, false news, and politics, to name a few of the topics we discussed.
Our dialogue occurred shortly after the appearance of a comprehensive 15,000 word piece of investigative journalism piece by Kay about a supposed organized sex-ring in the Psychology Department at McMaster University in Canada. Outrageous claims had surfaced, which ignited the university, and the local media, destroying the careers of various faculty and others, all of which eventually turned out to be false. Kay carefully explored how the original story developed, what factors prompted the University to act, and how local media played up the salacious claims without much investigation. It was a typical example of how false news can propagate, and also an indictment of the way Universities handle such claims, and local media may promote them.
The appearance of this story gave us the opportunity to talk about the state of journalism in general. Jonathan has had a unique career and background, which made him a particularly interesting dialogue partner about this issue. He actually was educated as a metallurgical engineer, and following that he pursued a law degree at Yale University, and was a tax lawyer before eventually becoming disenchanted and deciding to pursue a career in writing and journalism.
He also defies easy labelling. While he was a founding editor of the conservative Canadian newspaper The National Post, he also helped Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau write his memoirs. It is Jonathan’s non-ideological bent, perhaps due to his early training as a scientist and engineer that makes his perspective on today’s news so refreshing. We discussed his own background, what got him into writing, his experiences, and stories including the recent claimed Indigenous Residential School scandal in Canada, and the controversy surrounding the naming of the James Webb Space Telescope in the U.S.
When I contacted Jon this week to let him know the podcast is coming out, I learned that he had just completed a lengthy investigative piece about University of New Hampshire astrophysicist/gender studies social justice warrior Chanda Prescod Weinstein who, in the process of claiming victimization for herself and others, has apparently been bullying, harassing, and intimidating a host of others online, leading to complaints recently being filed at her institution. It coincidentally just came out yesterday, so this podcast is particularly timely. I hope you enjoy the discussion as much as I enjoyed talking to this fascinating man.
As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well.



Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

In mid October the Origins Project Foundation ran two public events in California. The second event was held at the Air and Space Museum in San Diego. I had asked my colleague Brian Keating, who teaches at UCSD and is a Trustee of that museum, whether he might be interested in doing a public dialogue together that we could later both broadcast on our respective podcasts. He and I have each appeared before on each other’s podcasts, and I knew that we could have the kind of comfortable, informative, and fun conversation that might appeal to a live audience, which would make for a different kind of podcast.
I am happy to present here the video record of that live-audience podcast, and the Q&A with the audience that was recorded right after it. Brian and I discussed many things, from forefront cosmology, to the nature of teaching and doing research, as viewed by an experimentalist and a theorist respectively, as well as broader questions associated with science in society today. The questions afterwards were equally interesting. I hope you enjoy both as you listen to or watch the podcast.
As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well.



Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Greg Lukianoff is a First Amendment lawyer by training. During his education he began to see how, even among organizations ostensibly created to help protect free speech, how actual free speech was improperly being conflated with harassment or bullying. When he went to work as a legal director of the nascent Foundation for Individual Rights in Education in around 2000, he quickly discovered that in academia, the one place where free speech and open inquiry should be valued above all else, actual free speech was under attack. In the intervening two decades, during which he rose to become director of that Foundation, now renamed to encompass the fact that the attacks on free speech that began in academia have proliferated throughout our society, he has actively worked to fight these attacks. Beyond his legal work, he has become a prolific writer. His 2018 book, co-written with Jonathan Haidt, entitled The Coddling of the American Mind, was influential in encouraging debate and discussion regarding the origins of the victimization mentality that was becoming prevalent in Western Society.
I have been admirer of Greg’s for some time, and have wanted to have a dialogue with him on the podcast. This year, with Rikki Schlott, Greg published The Canelling of the American Mind: How Cancel Culture Undermines Trust, Destroys Institutions and Threatens us All, and it provided us the ideal opportunity to get together to discuss both his own personal experiences , and also the general concerns we both have about the issues that form the heart of the new book.
What followed was a fascinating conversation about issues we should all care about. Regular readers of Critical Mass and listeners to The Origins Podcast will be aware of some of the examples and concerns we discussed, but I expect will nevertheless be surprised by the ubiquitous infiltration of cancel culture ideas into our society. We actually begin by defining Cancel Culture, a term that has often been misused and misunderstood in the popular media, and then discuss a variety of examples, before closing with a brief discussion of the ways that we can possibly combat it to produce a more tolerant, democratic society, and to save higher education as well. I hope you are provoked, enlightened, and energized by the conversation.
As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well.



Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Scott Aaronson is one of the deepest mathematical intellects I have known since, say Ed Witten—the only physicist to have won the prestigious Fields Medal in Mathematics. While Ed is a string theorist, Scott decided to devote his mathematical efforts to the field of computer science, and as a theoretical computer scientist has played a major role in the development of algorithms that have pushed forward the field of quantum computing, and helped address several thorny issues that hamper our ability to create practical quantum computers.
In addition to his research, Scott has, for a number of years, written a wonderful blog about issues in computing, in particular with regard to quantum computing. It is a great place to get educated about many of these issues.
Most recently, Scott has spent the last year at OpenAI thinking about the difficult issue of AI safety, and how to ensure that as AI systems improve that they will not have an unduly negative or dangerous impact on human civilization. As I mention in the podcast I am less worried than some people, and I think so is Scott, but nevertheless, some careful thinking in advance can avert a great deal of hand wringing in the future. Scott has some very interesting ideas that are worth exploring, and we began to explore them in this podcast.
Our conversation ran the gamut from quantum computing to AI safety and explored some complex ideas in computer science in the process, in particular the notion of computational complexity, which is important in understanding all of these issues. I hope you will find Scott’s remarks as illuminating and informative as I did.
As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well.



Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe